


a strange, bright shore

by sophiegaladheon



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: But Everyone is Alive in the Afterlife, But I Make My Own Rules Re. Force Ghosts, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Chocolate Box Exchange, F/M, Gratuitous Hand Holding, Light Angst, So don't worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-15 07:29:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13608534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiegaladheon/pseuds/sophiegaladheon
Summary: Jyn, Cassian, and the afterlife.orEveryone is a Force Ghost and has a lot of feelings.





	a strange, bright shore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [littlehuntress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlehuntress/gifts).



> Happy chocolatebox, everyone!

Jyn dies. So does Cassian. Of course they do. That’s the whole point. There is no escape, no running from the Death Star. The Empire does not bargain with Rebels or brook dissent. So Scarif burns and everything dissolves in a roaring wave of heat and light and pressure and pain and nothing. And the world goes dark. 

Jyn opens her eyes. So does Cassian. After all—there is no death. There is the Force.

* * *

The Force is strange. It is not a physical place, but it is _a_ place. She no longer has a physical form, but she has _a_ form. It doesn’t feel quite like having a body, but it isn’t radically different—maybe that’s just expectation shaping reality, who knows. But she feels like she can breathe properly for the first time in years, despite the disorientation, so that at least isn’t too bad. 

Truthfully, Jyn tries very hard not to think too much about it. It makes her not exactly a brain not exactly itch (how can she itch when she has no physical form?). Especially after several well-meaning but rather perplexing entities (Ghosts? Spirits? Beings? Ghosts. She is dead now, she is a ghost. The others are also ghosts) do their best to explain (confuse) the situation. It is not the best way to start off the afterlife, ambushed by a bunch of overenthusiastic, chatty, academics.

“They are Jedi, little sister,” says a familiar, friendly voice, cutting through the clamor of voices going on about the Force to echo in her not ears. Jyn smiles, or at least pushes the muscle memory of a smile through the not muscles of her not mouth, and makes her way over the best she can to give Baze a hug. 

Her awkwardness gets her a laugh, and she looks up to see Chirrut extracting Cassian from the excited knot of robed figures. “It takes practice to learn how to move without a body,” he says, “Do not worry.”

“And how have you learned so quickly?” asks Cassian.

“Time moves differently here,” says Baze, “Or rather, there is no time, the way we are used to. You will see.” 

Jyn shakes her head. She is not going to think about that, either.

* * *

When Jyn finds her parents she cries. She cries when she finds Saw, too. It’s like a dam she hadn’t even known was there has burst, spilling twenty years of tears out into the Force. Not loud, not dramatic, no sobbing, just fat tears rolling down ghostly cheeks in an unending procession. The onslaught continues, hugs and pats on the back, handshakes and cuffs to the head from people she hasn’t seen in years, dead or moved on and dead soon after. 

Even the ones that ended badly—and in the Rebellion many, many relationships ended badly—still garner nods and smiles and grudging respect. Jyn returns them, unsettled. Being the hero of the hour means something, apparently, but damned if she knows what to do with it.

And, of course, she’s still crying.

When Cassian finds her the crowds have gone and her parents and Saw have moved off to continue a vicious sounding argument. “Are you alright?” he asks.

“Yes.” Her voice is tight and she scrunches her eyes closed. “I think my mother is going to kill my father and Saw. Can you die again, once you are already in the Force?”

Cassian frowns and looks over at the distant shouting figures. “I don’t know. Are they . . .?”

Jyn laughs and pulls him into a hug. Her tears make dark spots on his jacket. “They’ll be fine, don’t worry. They haven’t spoken in over a decade, now they have to shout their opinions at one another. And you? How are you?” 

He hugs her tighter and sighs. “I am fine.”

* * *

Cassian finds his dead, too, but his reunions are quieter. His parents, of course, greet him with the tears and hugs of those reunited with a long-lost relative. He sighed and sinks into their embrace, the familiar, long ago scents of his childhood filling his nose despite the incorporeality of all parties involved. This is a feeling he had not thought he would ever get to experience again.

But the rest, the other reunions, are far more restrained, distant, even cold. A nod in passing, a handshake, perhaps a clap on the back. This, and the quiet observance of Jyn’s heartfelt—happy and exuberant and angry in equal measure—reunions drives home the reality of the past several decades of his life. Contacts. Targets. Informants. Colleagues. None of them knew a damn thing about him and none of them truly cared. Then again, neither had he. He was very good at his job.

So Cassian does what he always has done best. He puts on a smile, insinuates himself in the background, and watches, basking in the warmth of an Erso family argument, noting absently Baze and Chirrut laughing at the sight, Bodhi playing a card game to the side with a young woman and an older, bearded man. 

How is it, he wonders, that these people became so important to him in so short a span of time? He had always been good at keeping his distance, before. Well, he had always been good at not dying, before, as well. His life, well, his existence rather, had gotten rather strange of late.

“You forgot about me, didn’t you.” The familiar voice comes from behind him, and it takes a moment to process why it is _wrong_. Cassian starts and turns.

“Kay?” he asks, “What are you doing here?”

“Well, I died, didn’t I,” comes the wry, mocking response, “And this _is_ where people go when they die.”

“But you’re . . .” Cassian trails off.

Kaytoo just looks at him, tilts his head and waits for Cassian to finish his sentence. He doesn’t. Instead, he pulls his partner and best friend into a hug. 

“I’m glad you’re here, Kay.”

* * *

Jyn is the first to ask. Of course she is. It’s not that Cassian doesn’t care, of course he cares. He is just perhaps, tired. He would be perfectly happy resting a while longer, safe, calm, peaceful in the Force, enjoying the afterlife that he never thought he would get, with Jyn and Kay and all the others. Even the weird, awkward, occasional visits with Saw Gerrera were relaxing after the life he’d led. But Jyn asked.

“Do you think there’s a way we could see what’s going on, you know, with the Rebellion, and the Empire?”

Cassian puts down his holonovel and looks over at her. Jyn is standing casually, but by now he (and his years of intelligence training) know her well enough to read the tension in her posture, in the roundabout, casual way she asks.

“I mean, my mother talks about how she watched me growing up, so there must be some way, and after everything, well, I’d like to know, wouldn’t you?”

Yes, he would like to know. He spent far too much of his life in the Rebellion to not want to know how it ends. So he nods and says, “Let’s ask.”

* * *

Their first outing is to witness the destruction of the Death Star. Of course, it is not just Jyn and Cassian who go. It is Jyn, and Cassian, and all of Rogue One—“Of course we want to come,” says Bodhi, “Why would you think I would not want to see that monstrous weapon destroyed? We died for it, it destroyed my home, I want to see the end”—and all of their assorted families, colleagues, and friends, not to mention seemingly every member of the Rebel Alliance to have died in the last twenty years. And the entire Jedi Order. Jyn even notes, with a raised eyebrow and an elbow in Cassian’s side, a few splotches of Imperial grey in amongst the crowd of figures hovering nervously in the void of space in orbit of Yavin, watching the battlestation approach.

“I feel like I can’t breathe,” says Bodhi, “ It’s probably nerves, right?”

Jyn lays a reassuring hand on his arm. “I know,” she says, “It will be alright.” _I hope_. Her other hand slides into Cassian’s and clutches tightly as the first of the X-wings from Yavin IV flash by their vantage point. The crowd of ghostly onlookers hushes and redirects it’s attention to the impending confrontation.

* * *

Jyn doesn’t cheer when the station is destroyed. But she does feel a knot loosen in her chest that she hadn’t known was there. And she accepts the congratulatory slaps on the back with good humor, before heading off to join in welcoming the Rebel pilots lost in the fight to the Force.

* * *

“I would like to travel,” says Cassian, “See more of the galaxy.”

“Alright,” says Jyn.

He waits for a moment, to see if she will add anything. When she doesn’t, he clarifies. “I would like it if you were to come with me.”

“Of course,” she says, as if it were not even a question. A pause. “Will Kaytoo be coming with us?”

“Kay does as Kay likes. So, yes, I suspect, some of the time.” A pause, and Cassian holds his breath. Then:

“Alright. Where do you want to go first?”

* * *

“I’ve never been,” says Jyn, “Never had the chance, back before, too dangerous. And well, I always figured the Emperor’s home planet couldn’t be all that great, given what it inflicted on the rest of the galaxy.”

Cassian has been to Naboo before. He doesn’t mention this to Jyn. It had been a cock-up of a mission, in hindsight boring in its predictably unhappy end and nearly indistinguishable from the countless others like it he had faced during his lifetime. The extraction of a mid-level imperial bureaucrat gone ugly when the woman’s lover had turned them into the authorities, ending in the defector dead and Cassian spending three weeks in a nondescript Naboo suburb before he managed to make his way off-planet. 

Draven had been pissed about that one. The woman in question had apparently promised access to some rather interesting logistical data he was sore to lose access to. Cassian hadn’t known enough to judge one way or the other, but the time he had spent stuck in one of the lower rent buildings Naboo had to offer had convinced him that certain parts of the galaxy had forgotten poor people existed. 

He hadn’t gotten to see much of the planet on that trip, but then again, that was never the point. Instead, he just says, “It was Senator Amidala’s home planet, as well.”

Jyn concedes the point. They go to Naboo.

* * *

“It’s . . . quiet,” she finally says.

Cassian nods. The fields of wildflowers stretch before them, the only movement that of the stalks gently swaying in the wind and the peaceful grazing of a herd of shaaks in the distance. Their hands clasp tight, hard enough that it would hurt if they were still flesh and bone, but since they are now only spirits, projections of consciousness and will, the pressure is merely comforting. 

Jyn looks over at Cassian to find his expression pressed into the same grim look as the one she is sure she wears. It is hard, she thinks, to be reminded that there are still places like this in the galaxy—peaceful, seemingly untouched by outside concerns. A lie, of course. She wonders which is more troubling. That such places exist at all—that they are permitted to exist, in a galaxy where such cruelty and depravations pervade—or that such lies are told about them.

She doesn’t ask Cassian. Jyn just leans against him as they stare out at the wildflowers and the clear blue sky.

* * *

They travel the length and breadth of the galaxy. Mandalor, Mon Cala, Correlia. Sometimes Cassian doesn’t think it’s a good idea. Sometimes Jyn agrees with him. They witness the Empire’s destruction, environmental poisoning, theft, slavery, on Kashyyyk, on Riosa, on a hundred other worlds. When she closes her eyes Jyn can still see the destruction of Alderaan. Still, she says, it’s worth it.

Most days Cassian agrees.

* * *

They visit Vallt, where Jyn’s parents tell her she was born. It, too, is desolate, yet another casualty to the Empire, and to the Clone Wars before it. Jyn is glad they visit, though, one more piece in the puzzle that is her history. One more thing the Empire took from her reclaimed.

She breaks down crying when they enter the remnants of her father’s lab. When Cassian asks her why she can only shake her head and try and muffle the tears with her hand. He pulls her into a hug, pressing her face into his chest as he runs a hand up and down her back, murmuring softly as she cries.

He smells of all the things she remembers, of oil and cordite and sweat, and she knows it’s sense memory since if any of this were real, the tears or the smell, she certainly would have been rendered anosmic by snot by now. Still, it’s soothing, the smell, and the hand on her back, and the gentle words she does not understand. And so Jyn lets herself cry in the cold, empty bunker, long ago abandoned and forgotten, for things she cannot yet articulate and would not yet wish to, even if she could.

* * *

Coruscant is glittering and dirty and cold. They don’t stay long. There is some secret thrill in walking through the innermost halls of power of the Empire, standing in the very heart of the monster they gave their lives to help destroy, with none of the living any the wiser to their presence. But mostly it just gives Jyn a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She suspects it does to Cassian too. He has the look on his face he gets when he is reliving some long-concluded intelligence operation. She never asks, just slips her hand into his and holds tight. “Let’s go,” she says.

Cassian nods, and with a final look at the corrupted jewel of the galaxy, they depart.

* * *

Weightless feet make no sound on the crust of glass and rock and dust that lies where Jeddah City once stood. Jyn and Cassian hold back, hand in hand, eyes solemn. This may have been their fight, but Jeddah was not their home. Kaytoo had declined to come at all, despite Bodhi’s earnest assurances that any and all of Rogue One’s members would be welcome. Kay declined anyway, and brushed off Cassian’s inquiry as to why.

Chirrut and Baze stand where the temple once stood. Or, at least as close as they can guess. The mesa where the city once rose out of the surrounding desert has been obliterated, leaving nothing but a blasted debris-filled crater. They had had to calculate the position by the stars. 

Bodhi stands with them. There is no way for him to even guess at the former site of his family’s home.

“Why am I sad?” Jyn hears the soft words clearly in the silent landscape, undisturbed even by birds or scavenging rodents. “It’s not as if I lost anything, not really. I’ve seen more of my family since they’ve died than I did in any of the years I was working for the Empire.” A pause, a space, a breath. “It’s just . . .”

Bodhi stops. Baze lays a hand on his shoulder. The silence echoes across the scarred plane

* * *

Cassian had never thought he would return to Fest. Even now, standing in amongst the cold and dirty crowd of the marketplace, he cannot tell if it was a good idea. 

“Well,” says Kaytoo in his usual dry tone, “I can see why you didn’t come back. Although, it’s not as if most of the places you visited for the Rebellion were any better.”

It is, true enough, not a nice planet, Cassian knows. The scars of the Clone Wars and Imperial occupation run deep, both on the people and in the land itself. He can see decades of struggle and hardship and desperation carved into the faces of the people, in the missing limbs of the veterans, the persistent dry hacking coughs of the forced laborers, the thin wrists and hard eyes of the children.

This is where he is from. This place is part of who he is. And the children of Fest do not grow up kind. They grow up quick, and hard, and cold, if they want to grow up at all.

Cassian swallows around a lump in his throat and tears pool hot in his eyes. Jyn grips hard at his hand; Kay squeezes his shoulder. And for the first time in as long as he can remember Cassian Andor allows himself to cry.

* * *

The end comes, as it always must, not for Jyn and Cassian, not this time, and not—as they had so feared—for the Rebellion, but for the Empire. The second Death Star (and you had better believe the members of Rogue One were equal parts anxious and pissed off about that) is destroyed, the Emperor falls, and the celebration spans the galaxy. 

Jyn and Cassian are debating between joining the victory celebrations on Naboo or the ones on Corellia when Bodhi grabs them, going on excitedly about _the_ not-to-miss party. Cassian asks how he is suddenly the one with the best intelligence sources. Bodhi just smiles and shakes his head, and continues to pull them along. And that is how they find themselves on the forest moon of Endor with Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Leia Organa, half the Rebellion (dead and alive), a good deal of incredibly excited locals—“Ewoks, they’re called Ewoks,” says Bodhi—and multiple Jedi. The atmosphere is electric, libations flow freely, music and dancing and jocularity abound.

In the early hours of the next morning, as the party winds down and the light of the sun just starts to peek over the horizon, Jyn and Cassian find themselves tucked away in a quiet corner, out of the way of anyone else still conscious. The air is crisp and cool, and Jyn laughs as she reaches to brugh off Cassian’s shoulder. Polka dots of confetti fall to the ground and dissolve into nothingness. 

“You, ah, got something,” she says.

“Ah, I see,” Cassian smiles, “Well, then, in the interest of fairness,” he pulls a long strand of thin curled paper out of Jyn’s hair. It, too, winks out of existence as it floats to the ground. “Now we are both presentable.”

Jyn laughs again, and hugs him close. “It was a good party, wasn’t it?”

Cassian nods, and wraps his arms around Jyn. There is a moment of silence, then he asks “Where did you want to go next?”

“I hadn’t thought about it. There are still a lot of planets out there.”

“I was thinking,” he pauses.

“What?”

“I would like to see the Unknown Territories.” 

Jyn thinks for a minute. “It would be a change of pace.”

“Yes.”

“It would, perhaps, be nice to see something other than Imperial destruction or excess, for once.”

Cassian smiles. “Yes, it would.”

“Alright,” says Jyn, “Let's go see something new.” The smell of oil and cordite fills her senses as she hugs Cassian tight, and she looks up at him and smiles.

And Cassian leans down, and Jyn stretches up, and for mostly non-corporeal entities they manage to kiss just fine.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the poem "On a City I Meant to Visit, Now at War" by Jacqueline Osherow


End file.
